Lady Gaga needs her own thread

i wasn't serious about ne-yo

boo!

im just thinking mostly of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dZqghXe5FY

so obviously trying hard to be exactly that

OTM. There's something I find very grating about music or art or whatever that seems to be calculatedly designed to appeal not to me as a person, but instead as a demographic. Like women who insist that they "love the gays", there's an air about it all that makes (made?) me want to run for the hills.

So...um. At this point I guess I love the idea of her and hate the reality of her. Or grudgingly tolerate it.

I'm not trying to position her as some sort of rnb/hip hop conquerer, her producers and collabs and overall sound certainly make it an undeniable aspect of her career and that's how she's managed to be so successful, by straddling the genres and capturing as many music demographics as possible. I think Just Dance with the Akon and Colby O'Donis (?) guest spots was very strategic in that regard. But she has veered away from that since. She has managed to use that opening to take some things to the top of the chart that aren't typical of what's commonly been reigning, and as you said she's going to be referenced for a while, and nobody loves to reference hit songs like wannabe hit songwriters.

lol @ this being yet another gaga analysis thread

I'm genuinely surprised by the resistance and negativity. She's only occasionally GREAT (Pokerface, duh), but is generally at least decent and, it seems to me, deserves a lot of credit for authoring her own music and image in a field usually attaches "stars" as decoration to other people's work. Plus she's kinda subversive, in a dumb/funny garishly contrived way that's both grating and perversely appealing. I can't say I LOVE her, cuz the material's way too uneven so far, but I'm more than willing to give her the benefit of the doubt for a while.

Why all the hate?

because ppl give her backhanded compliments like "subversive, but i dont really like most of her songs"

lol @ this being yet another gaga analysis thread

― hoos-kingofthedrugs (deej), Thursday, November 12, 2009 8:15 PM (30 seconds ago) Bookmark

how could it not?

I like her Queen-sounding ballads, but I want to LOVE them.. I think if she perfected her songwriting further she could nail these.

because ppl give her backhanded compliments like "subversive, but i dont really like most of her songs"

― hoos-kingofthedrugs (deej), Thursday, November 12, 2009 8:16 PM (40 seconds ago) Bookmark

Are you saying that people (like me) who are intrigued by her image/style and maybe like a couple songs are the reason that other people get all irritated by her? I'm not sure I understand...

I can't say I LOVE her, cuz the material's way too uneven so far, but I'm more than willing to give her the benefit of the doubt for a while.

I think it's a combination of this with the out and out pretension displayed from the outset? When first presented with GaGa, a hitherto unknown pop artist who dresses fairly garishly, rambles on about Andy Warhol and how her project is a deconstruction of fame, but whose music does nothing to follow through on her stated goals, gut reaction is to write her off as the celebrity equivalent of an undergrad student babbling about post-modernism to sound intelligent. It was all a bit too calculated to feel genuine, a bit too 'quirky' for its own good.

i dont think anyone here is saying they 'hate' her really tho

is it like totally lame and old-fashioned to ask that someone make some decent songs before they get credit for having a persona or whatever?

the gaga songs i've heard are boring, hookless, rote pop exercises. they are so dour and un-fun.

http://1.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ks4tqt7qLJ1qzeu42o1_400.jpg

It's a question of - what is she: musicians or performance artist? And she scans initially and presents herself as a pop star (i.e. musician first and foremost). So while the image and so forth might be interesting, the central part of the package (the music) is sometimes good but never great.

Re the quality of her songs overall:

One of the problems with having written one incredible, indelible, perfect pop hit along with all your other perfectly decent journeyman work is that it tends to make the rest look like, well ... like perfectly decent journeyman work. You know?

poker face is 'incredible' 'indelible' 'perfect'??

what is this indelible perfect pop hit you speak of

yeah she could really be more show-not-tell instead of just going "this is post-modern! it's pop art! it's very gay and transgressive, can you handle it america!?"

If she were just an entertaining persona - a self-aware Paris Hilton writ large, lampooning our fucked up and strange relationship with the concept of celebrity fame and money I would be totally down with her. But her shtick includes videos, albums, and songs. So the middling quality of those necessarily have a bearing.

its super great but i prefer the song when presented by the avant-pop artist nosferatu

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBNOkGsI47E

now thats subversive

@Alex in Montreal: you phrase that as if performance art/musicianship are mutually exclusive?

i kinda feel like if you look back at some of the more high concept or kind of subversive stars in pop history, probably most of them made a big impact well before they really got credit for exactly what they were doing or started to really spell it out for people

lol criss angel poster

Pop star fails to sufficiently satirize pop music for non pop music fans shocker

It's like, I don't want NO gaga, I just want the Socratic Ideal of GaGa and not this bullshit real world version we are stuck with.

xp Not mutually exclusive! More that, if music is being included as part of your performance art, it had DAMN better be as good as a) your ideas, b) the rest of your performance and c) the music of the genre/scene/etc. that you are participating in/commenting on

If you try to satirize something you're not better or smarter than in any way then you're just..I dunno, Meet The Spartans?

NV i think the point here is that ppl who LIKE pop music find her stuff middling at best

Pop star fails to sufficiently satirize pop music for non pop music fans shocker

Yeah, whatever.

a) most of us ARE pop music fans.
b) she's made it perfectly clear that this is what she intends to do.

shes poorly satirizing all the way to the bank tbf

if you're going to claim the title of satirist/cultural commentator/provocateur and declare this fact in every interview you have in your first four months or so of exposure, you should not be surprised when people judge you on the basis of those claims.

xp so?

she's kind of like Marilyn Manson in how she just hammers home her agenda constantly and is like, looking around the room to see if she's getting the reaction she's looking for

so kudos for a successful business plan in this economy xp

marilyn manson could be a worse comparison

i don't really understand what that sentence means

sure, i mean she has achieved her goal of being famous

thats all im saying

I like the pretension, the transparent phoniness of the art posturing, the whole "my art is my celebrity" shtick. I don't like it cuz it's clever or deep; I like it cuz it's dumb, fun and funny. And cuz it somehow throws into harsh relief the fact that she's not a product, that she's a real person doing this very strange (and rare and probably terrifying, exhilarating) thing for a living. Kinda like Marilyn Manson in that regard. The goofball pretension adds a quality of humanity, of awkwardness to a genre that can sometimes seem rather impersonal. Or so it seems to me. I liked Peaches for similar reasons, though more (much more). I guess other people relate to other pop stars for other reasons...

honestly i wouldn't really give a fuck how she acts if i had just a single goddamn one of her songs in the non-album tracks section of my ipod

i am listening to bad romance now. i mean, really?

gaga ooh la la

lol it sounds like 6 people wrote parts of songs and then a 7th guy had to put them all together

man were there ever a bunch of lady gagas around here on halloween

she's a bad artist, but that's her best song imo xp

i could list off reasons why i don't like it but that would bore everyone. suffice it to say imo it is a horrible song.

i mean it makes her other songs sound like songs i would actually enjoy.

zzzzzzzzz

I'm sure Coop's A STAR IS BORN will revive interest in her catalog. My rankings.